by Janis Patterson
I married late, well after my
writing career was started, so The Husband knew exactly what he was getting.
Sort of.
A down-to-earth and sublimely
practical man of science well into a long and honorable military career, he
knew I was a writer of fiction. He also knew that writers were thought to be
eccentric. He just didn’t know how much.
Luckily he is a courageous and
adaptable man, for as our marriage progressed, he learned more than I think he
ever wanted to know about the unknown side of writing.
For example, he will leave in the
morning after kissing a pajama-clad me in my office, already sitting eye-to-eye
with the computer. He will come home some eight or nine hours later to find a
pajama-clad me in my office, exhausted and emotional, sitting eye-to-eye with
the computer. The laundry is undone, the bed unmade, dinner is a frozen lump
still in the freezer, and I will look up in surprise, asking if he didn’t leave
just a little while ago.
He has gotten used to me
murmuring the name of my hero (or villain) in my sleep without wondering about
the possibility of infidelity.
He has finally learned to accept
that when I am asked what I do, I smile sweetly, give the questioner my best
grandmotherly twinkle and say in soft, mellifluous tones, “I kill people.”
He no longer becomes alarmed when
he finds books on poisons larded among my cookbooks.
He has become accustomed to my
handing out business cards (with my websites only – no phone or address)
prodigiously and has even learned to carry a few of them in his wallet.
Apparently being married to a multi-published novelist carries a certain
cachet.
I’m glad, because on retrospect
I’m not sure writing is a lifestyle I would have chosen. I believe that almost
anyone can write, given enough time, training and work, but that writers cannot
help but write – it is an inescapable part of them, like some sort of birth
defect. He has learned that when I stop in mid-word, my face goes blank and my
eyes focus on some distant point that I am not having a fit, merely an idea.
This is usually followed by a frantic scribbling on anything around, from a
cocktail napkin to the back of my hand. He realized early on that I carried
enormous purses not for make-up or other feminine junk, but to accommodate my
tiny notebook computer, which he called my ‘purse computer.’ Now that my
uncertain back has put paid to large purses, he never sees me without a pen and
scratch pad – and usually a few choice (and unacceptable) words, because I
loathe having to handwrite anything.
Unfortunately, the creation of
worlds and populations on little more than caffeine and imagination can be an
unsettling process for a non-writer. Currently I am working on a book set in
contemporary Egypt – yes, yet another one. One of the side effects is a
profusion of photographs of obscure archaeological sites blooming all over my
office. Another is that our dinner menu has suddenly leaned heavily towards
kushari, kibbe, hummus and tabouli. Luckily The Husband is as big an
Egyptophile as I (doesn’t everyone know by now that he proposed to me in
Egypt?) and he takes this with equanimity.
I’m not always that lucky. While
writing Dark Music before my marriage, I lived in an
apartment. The hero was a concert pianist who specialized in Chopin. I played
Chopin almost 24/7 for the three months it took to write the novel. Though I
tried to be quiet and respectful, before long my neighbors were begging to know
when I would finish the book.
When I was writing The Hollow
House, a cozy mystery set in 1919, I pestered The Husband about WWI and
suitable firearms. Being something of a WWI/WWII historian, he happily
complied.
He was less happy when, at a very
crowded local gun show, we saw an automatic M96 Mauser Pistol Rifle, the
firearm I had decided on for my villain to use. It’s a very distinctive and
rather rare piece. I pointed it out gleefully and said to The Husband, “Look,
darling, isn’t that what I used to kill Jake?” The gun show might have been
packed, but suddenly there wasn’t a single person within arm’s length of me for
a long time.
Due to several ancient accidents,
I sometimes have a slight limp, especially when I’m tired. In Exercise
is Murder, the heroine has a severe limp, though hers was caused much more
dramatically by a bullet wound. As my tattered and beloved sweatshirt says,
“It’s All Research.” The Husband has become accustomed to my asking all kinds
of sometimes bizarre questions wherever we go.
I’d like to say I’m strong-minded
enough to keep control of my characters, to keep them on the page instead of
letting them seep into my life, but I’m not. As every character, good and bad,
shares at least a few aspects of its creator, so does the creator reflect – at
least temporarily – a modicum of the character. We create our characters from
the inside out, and I believe Loucard’s Principle, that when two things touch,
there is inevitable transfer from each to the other, however small.
I realized that The Husband has
not only learned but accepted this, for when I am in full
damn-the-torpedoes-and-write-mode, so submerged in the story that I never get
out of my pajamas and we survive on take-out suppers, he has developed the
habit of peering around my office door and asking, “And who are we today?”
Maybe he’s lucky. He remains
faithful, but still gets to live with a wide variety of women, all in one
package. He married a writer.
